Shirley Jacobs, whose records and TV appearances made her one of Australia's best-known guitar-strumming folksingers during the 1970s, embraced the instrument almost by accident. As a young mother of daughters Patti and Debbie, Shirley decided to learn piano but, finding it unfulfilling, came across a guitar in a second-hand shop and her career was born. Today, Shirley's voice can still be heard on at least ten albums, on websites devoted to the nation's musical heritage and on YouTube.

However her life was much more than music. As a social-justice advocate during her later years, Shirley was often embroiled in controversy and danger which peaked when her Carlton house was bombed in 1978, followed in 1981 by a term in jail on charges later proved to be false.

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Born in Euroa in 1927 as Shirley Gilbert, the youngest child of a former British army officer, she was a voracious reader and champion speller at school. She was also a natural entertainer and often in trouble for acting the clown in class. At age 15 Shirley enrolled in Melbourne's Stotts Business College, later found work as a legal secretary, and at 18, married a dentist, Horst Jacobs. She was divorced in 1966, but kept Jacobs as her professional name throughout her musical career.

During the 1960s there were coffee shops with folk singers springing up across inner Melbourne and Shirley was convinced she sounded better, and looked more attractive, than the men with goatee beards and skivvies she had seen singing Irish sea shanties. She felt she could bring something different to the scene and, lamenting that a lot of Australian folk material was old and tired, she collaborated with another local musician, Ade Monsbourgh, to put a selection of Henry Lawson's poems to music. Her haunting rendition of On the Night Train can still be heard on YouTube.

It was a tough time for female folksingers but Jacobs was no pushover. She could be fiery and relentlessly defiant, refusing to back down if confronted by what she believed to be an injustice. Her talent and persistence finally led to a major recording contract with RCA records.

After searching for more material, she decided to write her own, mainly about social and topical issues – the West Gate Bridge collapse, the Skipping Girl neon sign when it looked bound for the rubbish heap and people with disabilities – to name a few.

She published a songbook and toured, appearing at music festivals, schools and in concerts, and her passionate beliefs saw her singing on stage during the huge anti-Vietnam-war protests led by Jim Cairns in the early 1970s. On the eve of the 1972 election, Jacobs appeared as warm-up at a gathering of Labor supporters at St Kilda Town Hall. The crowd went wild as she strummed a final chord and Gough Whitlam strode onto the stage to give his "Men and Women of Australia" speech. By this time she was appearing regularly on television, on children's shows and performing weekly satirical songs for the ABC's This Day Tonight with often only hours to turn the subject matter into original verse.

Jacobs' decision to present a weekly radio show inside Pentridge Prison in the mid-1970s marked a major turning point in her life. She met and fell in love with a prisoner, Joey Hamilton, who was found by the Beach Inquiry to have been convicted on false changes. Hamilton's conviction was quashed and they were married as soon as he was released in 1978, but within weeks a bomb exploded on the doorstep of their home in Station Street, Carlton, destroying the entire front wall and shattering windows as far as 200 metres away. The newlyweds' lives were saved by a brick wall that shielded them while they slept in a rear bedroom. Crime writers John Silvester and Andrew Rule later wrote in The Sunday Age that a retired detective claimed two members of the consorting squad were responsible for the bombing.

The couple fled to a rented house in Waubra in country Victoria, which was destroyed by what they believed to be a deliberately lit fire, and in 1981, Joey and Shirley Hamilton were both falsely charged with trafficking in marijuana. At this stage, having little faith in the justice system, they decided to go on the run. They were arrested after more than two months hiding in Victoria's high country, and the folksinger – by now a grandmother – was locked up in Fairlea Womens' Prison.

The Hamiltons decided to defend themselves in court and were found innocent, after proving that corrupt police had again manufactured false charges. The couple's love never wavered in later years. They eventually moved to Reservoir where they lived for 20 years until Shirley's health started to fail. She was moved to a nursing home in Thornbury in 2006, and Joey sat by her bedside daily until her death.